In a span of thirty-five years that Congress spent six trillion taxpayer dollars in a failed attempt to upgrade American economic life, an astonishing decline occurred in our social life. In the time U.S. population increased by 41 percent, violent crime leaped by 560 percent and welfare spending by 630 percent. While spending on education increased 225 percent, SAT scores dropped 76 points. And a generation of sex education, designed to prevent unwanted pregnancies, staggers in disgrace under a 419 percent increase in out-of-wedlock births![1]
An unsettling anxiety besieges our future. For the record, Americans have often felt gloomy about the future. By 1736, settlers in Dedham, Massachusetts had hit the wall. What would become of them, the settlers worried? Kenneth Lockridge, in The First Hundred Years of a New England Town, noted that a limited amount of land in the town’s grant, communities breaking away from the original grant, and improvident farming methods were three of several more reasons for the negative feelings.
John Quincy Adams also expressed doubt about America’s future in 1839, a mere fifty years after Washington’s inauguration. In 1901, his grandson Henry Adams gave America 50 years to live. Then, in 1914, he noted that “no one anywhere expects a future.” In 1963, with Camelot awhirl with the superficialities of the Kennedy years, 59 percent of Americans said they were “dissatisfied with the honesty and standards of behavior of our people.” That was before JFK’s amorous sexual appetite became widely known.
“John Quincy Adams also expressed doubt about America’s future in 1839, a mere fifty years after Washington’s inauguration.”
Though pessimism is nothing new in society, historical problems have usually begotten it. In J. Q. Adams’ time, the possibility of civil war loomed over the slavery question. In 1914, war clouds menaced Europe. In the 1960s, for all our technological advantages, the threat of thermonuclear war hung over all political and military decisions.
Still, the Civil War was successfully waged, abolishing slavery. World War I was successfully waged, re-contouring history. Communism has fallen, the latest ideology judged by the God Communists denied. As any organized society has shown, political, economic, and manufacturing walls can be laddered and scaled, allowing access to their summits that secularize them, leading to their fall.
Yet no nation can overleap or sidestep the Moral Wall that God has placed in the world through his Word. None can successfully outflank that Wall. And, reflecting our collision with it, a disturbing unease stalks American life.
A survey from over thirty years ago discovered that 60 percent of us felt the national character had declined in the past 20 years. Why the certainty that our character—that’s the key word—not economy has declined? After all, we’re not always likely to be better off economically every four years. But if the national character is weaker year by year until it becomes alarmingly supine, that poses a threat to our existence. Can any of us seriously hope it’s gotten stronger in the past thirty years?
“No nation can overleap or sidestep the Moral Wall that God has placed in the world through his Word. None can successfully outflank that Wall.”
While on his second tour of duty in Viet Nam, then Captain, now General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Ret., discovered a message from Ho Chi Min to his troops. They had only to persevere against the Americans to win, Ho wrote. The Americans would eventually quit the war, because they weren’t “tough” enough to stay in it. Schwarzkopf said he discounted it as propaganda.
Then he came home and saw how clearly the communist understood the American psyche. And, in truth, what would be the result today if another Gettysburg cost 53,000 men dead and wounded in a three-day battle; or another Verdun cost 600,000 men dead and wounded? Would we tolerate such loss of blood for what we believed a significant-enough cause; or would we complain that “no cause is worth such a sacrifice”?
Character—what we are when none but God sees; national character; what we as a people become by the accumulation of all our individual characters—once it declines, how can it be reinvigorated? Once it’s lost, how can it again be found?
Blame the media for sensationalizing every trivial monkey into a gorilla, and for writing every good deed with disappearing ink, but that previous mumble of thunder in American life has become devastating storms of immorality. And as we can’t blame a barometer for the hurricane, neither can we blame the media for reporting wrongs that exist! We face the spectacle of a persistently disturbed society; we seem a jaded voluptuary, prematurely aged, slapping on heavier make-up to diminish the ravages of immorality. Every evil trades its wares in our increasingly secular society and many become millionaires in the trade.
“Every evil trades its wares in our increasingly secular society and many become millionaires in the trade.”
Secular humanism, the dark pestilence consuming our national life, had its origins in the European Renaissance and sought to reanimate national states by introducing into culture the philosophical dynamic of Greek teachers. Skepticism and atheism naturally followed, opposing God, mocking faith, denigrating biblical revelation, exalting humanity.
The growth of anti-God philosophy has accelerated since the 1960s, posing a conundrum to believers. How can the Creator of everything be ignored; how can the dynamite of the gospel be so easily defused and poured out as powerless powder? Especially when Christianity competed with significant advantage with the Renaissance for well over 400 years before the baleful effects of the Renaissance overwhelmed us! How could the spiritual life compete so amazingly well with godless philosophy for so many centuries, winning much more than it lost, then suddenly forfeit so many of its gains?
The following are a handful of the factors that have contributed to a growing secularization of American life:
- As fathers are increasingly absent in the home, the federal government has increasingly stepped in to be the provider. Fathers, who were meant to point children above to their loving heavenly Father, abandoned and abdicated their purpose to a secular welfare program which can’t love children or meet their deepest needs.
- Our saturation in carnal media—whether television, internet, or increasingly creating our own through artificial intelligence—engenders a feeling of living for the present, for whatever gratifies now, even if the future consequences are fatal! And that persuasion opens humanity to the grossest secularism, because the flesh glories in instant gratification; the body wants it all and it wants it now.
“Fathers, who were meant to point children above to their loving heavenly Father, abandoned and abdicated their purpose.”
- The theory of organic evolution has been a Goliath factor in secularizing life. It gives the impression that we’re improving beasts, not fallen humans; that we’re the product of chance, not the design of Almighty God; that the mark of untold millions of years of animal ancestry is on us, not the image of God that distinguishes us from everything else in creation.
- We have seen an increasing mood of religious liberalism and religious pluralism which undermine the integrity of God’s existence, Word, purpose, and relevance. Society cannot long entertain cynicism about God’s existence and purpose without soon practicing the immorality such doubt encourages and silently applauds by the absence of judgment against it.
Possibilities for Christians
These factors, among many others, have become prodigious multipliers of the demented legacy now tormenting society. Just as we have climbed a technological Mount Everest, we have plunged into an immoral Marianas Trench. The challenge Christians face is decoding the increasing immorality secularism has produced.
The first step in a solution is to fix blame. There’s no one I’d like to blame more than the liberal media, Hollywood film makers, evolutionary scientists, spendthrift Congressmen and environmental activists who view air pollution with alarm and casually overlook the lethal cultural stench. However, I’ve read enough Scripture to know that Christ put Christians in charge of the world’s destiny and holds them responsible for what happens to it. And if we find ourselves suspended in a web of immorality, our inactivity and silence have allowed Satan to spin it. We have killed by silence God’s megaphonic voice to the world.
We have learned to our chagrin that it’s altogether possible to fraternize with people without influencing them—because we fail to view all contacts with unbelievers as eventual openings into witnessing and evangelism. We sleep like lions though God made us watchmen on the wall; we flee when predators race for the flock instead of hazarding our lives in its defense as good shepherds should. We have developed to an art a contradictory dualism between belief and behavior.
“We have learned to our chagrin that it’s altogether possible to fraternize with people without influencing them.”
Given our failures, how can fallen humans ever overcome their humanity to become influential witnesses? I suggest the following as a start:
First, remember that, while imperfect obedience flaws our expression of God’s solution, it doesn’t diminish the truth of the solution. As we confess to them our own personal immaturity that keeps our witness from being altogether mature, unsaved sinners are likewise encouraged to confess their sins and not use our incompleteness as their excuse to remain unrepentant.
Second, we must hold fixed, clear convictions about God, Christ, the Bible, and the Church. 
Third, we must strain every nerve to walk our talk! There is still nothing in human life like a Christian alive with faith in Christ! Christlikeness is our goal, because Christlikeness alone demoralizes Satan. We don’t teach Christ in order to build up church membership or worship attendance, but because only the Christ-life overcomes Satan! Just as his physical presence in his earthly ministry bound Satan, so his spiritual presence in the lives of his people binds Satan. Now: the same Person, the same Presence, the same Power, the same Result when He is installed and reigns in the re-created life!
Fourth, an absolute integrity must characterize our appeal. We cannot, as some church groups, have hidden agendas. A church-sponsored Halloween party, advertising a haunted house, instead showed pictures of aborted fetuses. Another Christian group established a counseling center for unwed mothers-to-be; once inside the center, the women were subjected to high-pressure, anti-abortion teaching. These specious approaches damage spiritual integrity. Christians have nothing to hide and the greatest possible news to publicize. We don’t have to skulk like thugs ashamed of the light, or like amateurs unsure of our beliefs.
“Christians have nothing to hide and the greatest possible news to publicize.”
Fifth, we must believe concretely that only the church—not any human structure, political, economic, educational, or financial—contains God’s eternal verities. Forgetting our spiritual roots in the past decades has nearly cost us our nation. In the previous century, while fixed on the potentially deadly confrontation between communism and democracy, we hardly noticed the demise of an American culture whose laws and customs were once based on Judeo-Christian values. Now that the communist threat has passed, we find the threat of secularism deadlier by far to our national ideals. All along, in those years, the real threat wasn’t communism, as we thought, but a crawling, that became a galloping, secularism. And while democracy won the political war, it will lose the cultural war unless that is renewed through spiritual values only one organism possesses.
Sixth, we must understand that that spiritual organism—the church of Jesus—possesses the ability to completely renovate American society if we focus again on making disciples through evangelism of the lost and discipling the saved so they can reproduce themselves in other lost souls. The loss of evangelism engendered a loss of high public morality; a reinvigoration of disciple making will once again regain the mores lost by its discontinuance. The human heart, once changed, changes life!
Here the benefits of denominationalism in American life can be seen. Will Durant was right when he said “…a religion is at its best when it must live with competition; it tends to intolerance when and where it is unchallenged and supreme. The greatest gift of the Reformation was to provide Europe and America with that competition of faiths which puts each on its mettle, cautions it to tolerance, and gives to our frail minds the zest and test of freedom.”
“The human heart, once changed, changes life!”
Nowhere is the second law of thermodynamics more clearly at work than in church life. Without outside restorative forces, every Christian body develops a self-centeredness that invariably brings decline. This is obvious in the beautiful cathedrals of England and Europe—symbols of a past faith that built structures but deprived of present power to reach people. The leadership lost people by focusing on the institution, not on individuals. By institutionalizing the church, the leadership always determined what was in the interest of the institution—which may not be helpful to people; rather than what was good for people—which can’t be anything but helpful to the institution.
Seventh, to ignite spiritual renewal in society, the church must be renewed by Bible preaching at a deeper level than our pastors/preachers have been accustomed to deliver and our congregations have been accustomed to hear. Only when biblical preaching hibernates does Satan awaken. Where Jesus is awesomely proclaimed, Satan is shackled; where Jesus is preached only weakly and trivially, Satan roams.
A lesson God’s people ignore today is their continued inability to influence society. Truth exists in the person of Jesus Christ alone. And if it’s perfectly understandable for the unsaved to think there’s no difference in religion that really matters, God’s people know the difference and will not surrender it to pacify the lost.
“Where Jesus is preached only weakly and trivially, Satan roams.”
One other word: we can’t afford to believe that our insistence on Jesus Christ being the only way to Heaven is a stumbling block to the unsaved. That isn’t so. People may not like to hear us say it, but that isn’t the reason they reject it. They reject it mainly because they don’t see in our personal lives the evidence such astounding truth should provide—the superior grace Jesus Christ alone gives! The failure, “the ill examples of nominal Christians,” as David Brainerd wrote of his work among the Indians, “renders it so unspeakably difficult to treat with them about Christianity.” Again, while we have talked our faith, we haven’t walked our talk!
From now on, till history ends, Christians absolutely must look to what God says is right, not to what society may consider right. And we must express Christ’s superiority with His superior life.
[1] These figures are taken from William J. Bennett.
